MapRelief provides the disaster affected communities with practical tools to help guide and manage relief workers' activities and empower impacted communities in their own rebuilding efforts. MapRelief provides a targeted and early response in disasters by:

• Producing facility, terrain, and road maps for emergency relief field workers
• Producing guide books for technical assistance in locational tools and protocols
• Providing in-the-field technical training for GPS, GIS, and remote sensing
• Providing staff and volunteers to augment aid workers with technical assistance
• Co-ordinationg field data collection and relief analysis for targeting aid relief

First response in emergencies and natural disasters means attending to the medical, food, housing, and security needs of the afflicted peoples. Improvements in the ability of nations and the international community to address disaster management is evident over the past decade. It remains a fact, however, that for many parts of the globe the lack of accurate and updated maps remains a critical need in guiding relief and workers in their humanitarian efforts to deliver life-saving materials and medical supplies.

MapRelief was born of the need to co-ordinate field data collection among the humanitarian community and produce and deliver "best available" information in the form of field maps and guides that can be trusted by relief workers in the field. Conditions of roads, temporary relief centers and distribution depots, as well as the detailed information on the locations and conditions of the affected and threatened populations are vital to the execution of effective aid operations. Locations of schools, hospitals, religious facilities, water supplies, supply depots, helicopter landing zones, and other data of filed intelligence value represents a dynamic database of geographica information that must be continuously updated and checked to create credible mapping products. And all of this information management must be completed in an environment impacted by disaster under extreme conditions often lacking the basic infrastructure elements.